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H-France Review Vol. 13 (November 2013), No.184 Eric Dunning And H-France Review Volume 13 (2013) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 13 (November 2013), No.184 Eric Dunning and Jason Hughes. Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology: Knowledge, Interdependence, Power, Process. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. xi + 239 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $120.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 1-78093-225-5; $29.95 U.S. (pb). 1-78093-226-2; $30.99 U.S. (eb). 1- 78093-339-9. Review by Paul A. Silverstein, Reed College. Over the last several decades there appears to be a growing interest in the sociological legacy of Norbert Elias (1897-1990), or at least a concerted effort by his former students, colleagues, and fellow- traveling “Eliasians” to spur broader attention to a theorist and researcher whose work has often been ignored or marginalized within the Anglophone social sciences. While scholars of Europe have long been familiar with his seminal historical essays The Civilising Process[1] and, to a lesser extent, The Court Society[2]--texts originally written in the 1930s but not widely available until the 1960s or translated into English until the 1970s or 1980s--his prolific empirical studies and broader contributions to social theory (many of which were only posthumously published) are not well known outside of a few subfields of the sociology of sport, leisure, violence, and emotions, or within delimited sociological circles primarily in the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Beginning in 2005, the Norbert Elias Foundation, in association with University College Dublin Press, has collected and re-published in eighteen volumes the entirety of his oeuvre, including re-editions of his monographs, compilations of previously un-translated essays, and even a reconstructed version of his study, The Genesis of the Naval Profession,[3] taken up in the early days of the Second World War. Norbert Elias and Modern Sociology, authored by Eric Dunning and Jason Hughes, functions as a bookend to this re-publication effort, and follows on a number of other works dedicated to Elias that have appeared since the late 1990s, notably by Eliasian historical sociologists Richard Kilminster, Steven Loyal, Stephen Mennell, and Dennis Smith, all of which are drawn upon in the new volume.[4] Dunning, an eminent sociologist of sport, is a former student, colleague, and collaborator of Elias at the University of Leicester. The two co-authored numerous essays on the history of football, a number of which are included in their ground-breaking Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process.[5] Hughes is also a former Leicester student and current faculty member, who wrote an explicitly Eliasian study of tobacco smoking.[6] Their new, richly researched book presents both a primer to Elias’s “figurational” (or “developmental” or “process”) sociology, as well as a sustained and ardent defense of this approach from its detractors, going as far as proposing it as a potential cure to what the authors see, via Alvin Gouldner writing in 1970,[7] as the current “crisis” within modern sociology. Throughout the book, Dunning and Hughes connect Elias’s life and work, his experiences as an exile from Nazi Germany to his explorations of power, social interdependence, and (de)civilization. Elias’s own intellectual trajectory in many ways charted the development of European social theory in the twentieth century, as well as his own capacious scholarship--what he called a “human science” (or “Menschenwissenschaft,” [p. 7])--that blurred the boundaries between sociology, history, philosophy, and psychology. Born in the Imperial German city of Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) in 1897 to a Jewish merchant family, Elias served on the Western Front during World War I, although already radicalized H-France Review Volume 13 (2013) Page 2 as a member of the Zionist Blau-Weiss Bund, alongside future German Jewish intellectuals like Erich Fromm, Leo Strauss, and Gershom Scholem. Having received a classical Gymnasium education, he went on to study both medicine and philosophy at the University of Breslau, eventually earning a doctorate with a dissertation on the philosophy of history. He then switched to sociology, first under the tutelage of cultural sociologist Albert Weber (the brother of Max) at Heidelberg, then under sociologist of knowledge Karl Mannheim at Frankfurt, where Elias completed his Habilitation in 1933 with a thesis on the “courtisation” of the French nobility under Louis XIV that would only be published thirty-six years later in German and first translated to English in 1983 as The Court Society. As Dunning and Hughes relate, while Elias was working as Mannheim's assistant in Frankfurt, he forged ties with members of the Institute for Social Research (later referred to as the “Frankfurt School”) which shared a building (called “Marxburg”) with the Sociology Department, and Elias ended up facilitating Theodor Adorno’s escape from Nazi Germany. After completing his Habilitation, Elias himself fled to Paris (his mother would later die in a Nazi extermination camp) where he had an informal affiliation at the École Normale Supérieure under philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré and embarked on sociological studies of kitsch art and the expulsion of the Huguenots from France. He moved to London two years later where he completed the research and writing of The Civilising Process, and then rejoined Mannheim as a Senior Research Assistant at the London School of Economics (where he also worked with evolutionary sociologist Morris Ginsberg), before being interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien (where he continued to offer informal courses, as well as wrote and produced an opera). He only joined the faculty of the University of Leicester in 1954, his first permanent academic position, before which he worked for the British military to “de-Nazify” German war prisoners, taught adult education, and helped develop and administer group analytic psychotherapy to war survivors alongside his fellow Frankfurt colleague S.H. Foulkes. With friend and fellow émigré Ilya Neustadt, Elias established Leicester as a center for academic sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued to train students there until 1978 when he moved on to Bielefeld and Amsterdam. He also had a notable two-year stint in the early 1960s at the University of Ghana where he taught alongside noted British anthropologist Jack Goody. Dunning and Hughes do not actually present this incredible biographical trajectory in a straight- forward, chronological manner, in part because it has been well covered in earlier works by Elias’s former students as well as in Elias’s own essay, Reflections on a Life.[8] Instead, they trace (often via Dunning’s personal anecdotes) how Elias’s various life experiences and academic affiliations progressively contributed to the development of his figurational theory of social life and his particular commitments to sociology as a positive science of human development. They emphasize the ways Elias’s scholarship synthesized the various strains of social theory being developed in Weimar Germany, wartime France and postwar Britain. Elias adapted the post-Kantian (“post-philosophical” [p. 74])[9] turn to actual, historical human relations outlined by Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, while departing from the strict evolutionism of the former and materialism of the latter, as well as rejecting the scientistic positivism and functionalism that later sociologists had developed from these two foundational theorists. He likewise built on Max Weber’s comparative and historical analysis of power as an asymmetrical social relation (a “structural characteristic of a relationship” [p. 66]) rather than an attribute or thing--and indeed much of Elias’s classic work was concerned with how European states came to monopolize relationships of dependency--while rejecting Weber's tendency towards philosophical nominalism and his idealist rendering of the absolute detachment of the scholar. At the same time, like his Frankfurt School peers, Elias sought to connect the study of psychic and social development, combining both psychogenetic and sociogenetic analyses in The Civilising Process, which Elias saw as in direct dialogue with Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, while simultaneously moving beyond the individualistic focus of Freud to a more sociologically informed psychotherapy that he would develop with Foulke. Such an attempt to synthesize Marx and Freud (in Elias’s case, via Comte, Weber, and others) amounted to, Dunning and Hughes remark, “something akin to the search for the H-France Review Volume 13 (2013) Page 3 ‘philosopher's stone’ or the ‘Holy Grail’ among social scientists in the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 80). As Dunning and Hughes insightfully detail, the resulting synthesis approached human individuals and the various social worlds they collectively create as ongoing processes of historical development. Attempting to avoid the reification of processes (what Elias called “process-reduction”) to steady states in static conceptualizations like “structure,” “system” or even “society,” Elias adopted a new vocabulary of verbal nouns like “socialization,” “urbanization,” “sportization,” et cetera (p. 51). Along these lines, he understood the proper object of sociological study to be “figurations”--the dynamic and fluid ties of interdependence that humans form with each other--thus replacing what he saw as a false individual- society antinomy premised on an understanding of humans as “closed-off” from one another (homo clausus) with an open-ended vision of homines aperti (“open people”) (pp. 52-58). Such an insistence on process, Dunning and Hughes claim, served to circumvent the perennial “structure-agency problem” of social theory, sailing between the “‘Scylla’ of reification and determinism...and the ‘Charybdis’ of individualistic reductionism and voluntarism” (p. 57). The emphasis on history and interconnectedness further avoided what Elias similarly saw as a false philosophical divide between ideas and reality, between consciousness and materiality, with Elias instead treating reality not as “‘a thing out there’, but rather as a dynamic totality which includes humans and their...knowledge as an integral part” (p.
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